THE SUPREME COMPLIMENT

She was very beautiful, far and away the most beautiful feminine divinity of our generation. It was a puzzle how the Manufacturer of Gods and Goddesses achieved her manufacture with the human elements at His disposal, for even the most exquisite skeleton of whittled ivory as a background and the finest modelling of the refined and rosy clay of girlhood, all tightly and attractively enclosed in the thinnest and most transparent chicken-skin, could not account for the charm of Melissa Delme. Minute were the saphenous veins underlying her satined skin. Her eyes were glaucous as those of the grey-eyed Athena. Her hair was as barley-sugar finely spun. Her lips tied a tiny tulip. Her feet were quicksilver. No reference to her stage success is needed. From the moment that she first appeared at the Hounslow Hippodrome to the series of rapturous farewells for ever associating her name with Worthing Pier, her professional path was a rose alley and her private life a continual and seraphic serenade.

Perhaps that was why it was so dull. It was all Up without Down. Her whole life worked like a little piece of divine clockwork. Delicate as was her art, her success was machinelike. It was too perfect to admit of any criticism or even of much discussion. It is true there was some division in the Clubs as to whether she sang better than she acted or whether she played the violin better than either. At White’s a vote was actually taken and her power of song exalted above her expression in music. The Travellers’, on the other hand, decided that she danced even better than she sang. At the Bachelors’, however, these matters remained too painful for discussion.

So her life remained unutterably dull. Every man who met her fell in love punctually at the third minute, and remained doing and saying and presumably thinking the same things at scheduled intervals. The London male seemed to be furbished and furnished from the same gigantic slot-machine. She had only to drop a pennyworth of smile and press with her hand, for the same wearisome sequel to follow, the same inane amatory collapse, the same letters, the same flowers to match the cut and dry compliments, the same proposals. For a fortnight she once fled to America in wild hope of variety and adventure, but returned sadly after enduring the same accents and the same accidents from New York to Chicago, and back.

Melissa Delme remained on the stage for two years of crowded life and crowded audiences. But the greater the crowds that flocked to see and hear her, the more lonely she became. She was too bright a constellation to become companionable. Had she been less a paragon she might have found a paramour. But she remained as intact and virtuous as a marble statue in the midst of a shopful of brittle and vulgar Chelsea china. She was really a little too beautiful and it had made her capricious and careless. Some women try to resemble posters, but it was the posters that tried to look like Melissa Delme. She had long ceased to care whether she was admired or not. She only cared whether she admired herself. All other admiration was commonplace, but the flashing compliments of her mirror were Narcissan and acceptable. Externally she became exquisitely unique. Within she remained unabatingly bored. She never expected to fall in love. The God, Who made her, had exhausted Himself, and in finishing His masterpiece forgot or withheld one thing, the capability of receiving or feeling love. So she remained the divine masterpiece and mistress of no man. Then the time came when she was understood to be considering proposals and they multiplied, but without disclosing more originality than so many tenders from British tradesmen. The first note of variety occurred in the letter of a Cabinet Minister in Holland. She read it and took it as a joke, but in the end she married him and took a Dutch treat. Tell it not in White’s and whisper it not at the Bachelors’ Club! It appeared that he held a very responsible position in his own country as Minister of Cheeses. So she settled down in the romantic Hague and gave birth to a succession of little Dutch dolls. There is no foundation to the rumour that she was the only woman to cause jealousy to the Queen of Holland. She was never anything but virtuous, beautiful and bored. In the end her beauty bored herself. She was too beautiful; that was all. There was no flaw in her morals or in her looks. She was only discovered to be not quite human, which was not surprising as she had been created a Goddess.

But it is historical to relate that supreme efforts were made during her sparkling career on the stage to deviate her virtue and to keep her for England.

When all ordinary compliments had failed, the more ingenious of her admirers set themselves on the path of invention. One of them sent her a beautiful leather toilet bag with every article made in chocolate—chocolate hair-brushes, chocolate flasks and bottles, chocolate scissors and manicure with enough silver-paper to give the illusion of reality. She played with it for half an hour before she sent it to the Children’s Hospital. I mention this comparative success, for the idea was originally mine and was carried out by my dear friend Ernest Beaugent, who spent the best years of his life and genius courting Melissa Delme. His hot rival during those years was his brother Peter, who on hearing of the success of my chocolate immediately and recklessly capped the gift the next day by sending her a whole portmanteau stuffed with sweets. That was possibly why confectionery figured so considerably in his later bankruptcy proceedings. Then Melissa took to skating, and all her admirers ransacked the dealers for skates—iron skates, steel skates, American skates, Swiss skates, Norwegian skates. However, Peter triumphed for a winter by having a pair of skates made of gold with steel blades. Gold skates could not be trumped, and it was not till the spring that Ernest found occasion to cap the compliment.

It was over camellias. In those days flowers were often unprocurable in England. There was no flower express from the Riviera. The flower industry in the Channel Isles had not been developed. To ask for a bunch of camellias in January was like asking for plovers’ eggs at Christmas. Yet that was exactly what Melissa asked of Ernest one Monday morning, presumably to be quit of his attentions for the week. She was going to the Opera on the Wednesday and said she would much like to carry a bouquet of camellias. Instead of offering her the moon on a silver salver or a slice of the sun, would he be practical enough to procure so simple a nosegay? Ernest went out thinking. That night he crossed to Paris. Melissa must have thought no more of him, for he afterwards learnt that she had ordered herself a large spray of artificial blossoms. He crossed to Paris because he did not believe that the camellias were really impossible to obtain. He happened to be a railway director by trade, and one of an inventive turn of mind. Though born a gentleman and bred a graduate, he had surprised Victorian society by becoming a competent engine-driver. He had qualified in all the tests, and every Saturday instead of a ride in the Park or joining a shooting-party he used to drive an Express to some watering-place on the South Coast. He was on the Company’s reserve list of drivers in case of invasion or railway strike. And in emergency he was always liable to be summoned. Several times he had driven Royalty without mention of his name being made in the Court Circular. It remains, by the way, for a Labour Government to insert among the names of guests or preachers who have the honour of boring their Majesties the names of the honest engineers and stokers who have the honour of driving them.

Ernest’s Directorship enabled him to keep back the next train due to leave for Calais, which being duly caught he sat back and let thoughts run through his brain valves with an open throttle. He reached Paris the next morning and called on his French colleagues, who were Directors of the lines to the Riviera. Haltingly but obstinately he explained how important it was that he should have certain flowers in London by the evening of the following day. It was believed that there was one horticulturist in the South of France who kept a camellia farm.

He had long held the repute of a mad Englishman among his French colleagues and his predilection for driving engines appeared only a vagary of sport. It was more conceivable to them that he should want a special train to fetch camellias from the Riviera, but even so whether it was, as he said, for a wedding or, as they suspected, pour complimenter une dame, it seemed an inconceivable luxury. They suggested telegraphing and arranging for the next train from the Riviera to bring a few blossoms on his behalf. He assented wildly and waited a day and a night in Paris. He was fond of describing how the Riviera Express reached Paris on the early morning of Wednesday leaving him one half-hour to transfer the expected bouquet of camellias to the first train leaving for London. What was his amazement when he found the officials of the train struggling under three huge baskets full!

There was just time to convey them from the Paris, Lyon Méditerranée station to the train at the Gare du Nord. That evening he reached her apartment and sent a fresh bouquet to her while she was dressing. The answer was an invitation to her box that night. He had moved her at last! The compliment had shot home and it only remained for him to crown his deed by scattering the remainder of the flowers outside her doors as a surprise. He emptied three basketfuls. There were a hundred bunches at least in each and to his delight they carpeted the whole of the tiny space between her dressing-room and her sitting-room. Bunch by bunch he flowered the floor and went his way. The result could only be imagined. When Melissa Delme swept out of her room in an opera cloak of the colour of green agate with a silver lining she felt her feet treading on something soft. It was a minute before she realised that the carpet had changed its touch and texture during the time she had taken to change herself into evening clothes. Later in the evening she allowed Ernest to know that he had added a full minute’s delight to her simpler emotions. It was undiluted triumph!

News of Ernest’s coup percolated the Clubs and led to more and more serious attempts to win the unwinnable. His contemporaries racked their brains and their bank accounts in the endeavour to surprise and please her, but she was difficult to surprise and impossible to please. For her generation she remained more than a little unattainable. She was the great unattained. In fantasy I can visualise her now. She had green-pupilled eyes like emeralds washed under spring water, and hair that was neither gold nor bronze. Her step was long famous on the boards. It was said by critics to be precisely composed of a Fairy’s falter, an Angel’s tread and a Dryad’s trip. The divinities entrusted with her composition had very deceptively fitted layers of Aphrodite and Adonis in the mould without vitiating the exquisiteness of her sex. Her boyishness made her girlishness even more feminine. Her femininity framed her boyishness to perfection. While she reigned on the stage, her dazzling purity, based on boredom and the unfortunate omission of one vital element in her celestial make-up, made the acting profession even more respectable than it really is. Clergymen’s daughters applied for places in the Chorus; an Archdeacon’s wife wrote a play called “Archidiaconal Functions,” which three Bishops incidentally denounced by Pastoral without having read, and several Dowagers wrote to Mr. Edwardes of the Gaiety Theatre giving permission for their unmarried daughters to play leading parts.

And all the while Ernest was devising new ways of surprising her, and his brother was trying to cap and supplant him. Ernest’s love became Platonic perforce. He took the habit of inquiring her holiday movements and taking the engine-driver’s place on the metals. It pleased him fiercely to think that her life unwittingly was in his hands; that he was even directing her path and her speed; that while she lay back in cushioned companionship he kept lone watch spying out her lightning track, as though it had been granted to him to carry her through space. The first time he had hopped off the cab at the end of the journey and revealed himself under his oily rags she was more than surprised. For the second time in his life he had pleased her. No admirer hitherto had adopted such an unexpected disguise of approach. The second time he appeared to her as an engine-driver she took no notice. In the end he was content to drive the trains in which she was travelling out of pure and unrewarded intellectual love.

Peter had no profession or accomplishments, so he could only waste ways and means to keep step with his brother’s courtship of Melissa. He once crossed the Continent to watch her change trains at York. She was staying in a country house, to which he had failed of an invitation, but he travelled two days and a night to be in time to meet her on the platform and to carry her wraps to the next. Then he waited bareheaded while her train drew out.

Soon after this romantic excursion Peter’s affairs passed from bad to worse financially, and finally a family conclave met to decide whether to cut his losses or cut him adrift. Peter was the only light-hearted person at this domestic trial and investigation. Though Melissa was never mentioned, it was found that his debts had been largely incurred in planning and conducting surprises, parties and compliments on her behalf. His family were grave but generous. Ernest, as head of the family, took a lenient view towards one whom he considered an ineffectual rival; the game was in his hands. He suggested that his brother should leave the country and promise his family not to return provided they guaranteed him a tolerable income out of their own inheritances. Peter’s future was thus settled. After the meeting Peter approached his brother and rather limply muttered that he was sorry to have caused all this trouble, but that if his brother would lend him sixty pounds down that day he would gladly sail to Australia and forgo the annuity his relations so kindly proposed for him. He promised they would never hear of him again unless he struck gold or won the Melbourne Cup. Ernest looked into his brother’s sheepy eyes and felt moved both to pity and economy. It was surely better to present him with sixty pounds then and there than to give him a banker’s order for an annual hundred. He drove him to the Bank and gave him the sum in crisp new notes, said good-bye handsomely and returned to his Club. He had reason to feel virtuous, generous and comfortable.

An hour later he was about to sit down to a good dinner when a messenger arrived from the Terminus station-master with an emergency summons to drive a Special to the South Coast that evening. He looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to Victoria and look over his engine. It always did him good mentally and physically to drive a fast train to the sea, especially a small one made up of Saloon and Guard’s Van. He could imagine making a speed record with no stops. He was at Victoria in ten minutes. His overalls were ready and his favourite fireman was already wiping the clutches with an oil rag. It was a new powerful engine, the finest on the line, and he spent every minute before the start fingering and touching levers and parts. Steam had brought the boiler to the point of exasperation. At the sound of the whistle he loosed the engine with a sniff and a plunge across the Thames. It was exhilarating to gather speed and he had no thought of the occupants of the Saloon—semi-royalties or South American millionaires, no doubt. He gave them a rippling run over the steel threads through Surrey and Kent. The engine throbbed and danced to all the emotions that are procurable to steam and grease and steel, and Ernest made the dash of his life—one indeed that he was never to forget, though it was years before he dared tell, even in the secret recesses of his Club.

As he neared Folkestone he felt proud of his own driving. He had not lost a minute out of the fastest expected time. He was moving the engine across the points as slickly as a dancer moves his partner in and out of corners on a dancing floor. He slowed the train down to an exact standstill like a musician bringing to final poise and close some great piece upon the organ. He felt the great instrument of hissing pipes and pounding pistons and escaping winds sink under his powerful handling to a solemn standstill. But when all was over and the fireman was creeping round the front of the engine with the oiler, Ernest felt a certain curiosity to see what particular Pasha or Serene Highness or Great Mogul or plain New Yorker could have afforded the cost of such a trip. Slipping off the panting mass of metal he passed round the station into the waiting-room, through which the passengers were bound to pass. With a greater throb at heart than the engine had given in its fastest moments, Ernest reeled. He had recognised that the Serene Highness in this case was Melissa Delme. He could only pull the greasy cap off his head and stand to foolish attention. Whether she deigned to recognise him or not he never knew, for he devoted his eyesight to exchanging a long and meaning look with the Pasha. The Pasha was brother Peter! Ernest said he just stood and choked, as though he had swallowed a lump of train grease. When the couple had both disappeared in the direction of the Boulogne boat he began to feel that there was something magnificent in his brother’s performance. Ernest crawled home on a goods train and on arrival at Victoria inquired what the cost of the Special had been. He was told that it had cost just sixty pounds!